Design

I never thought that I would agree with Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi starchitect who has failed time and again to support the green building movement. But her dismissal of claims that the Al-Wakrah stadium looks like a vagina has my support.

Qatar is undergoing a massive change, and many of the world’s top architects are hoping to become a part of the action. Zaha Hadid and AECOM have weighed in with the Al-Wakrah stadium, and now Sou Fujimoto has re-imagined Doha with a series of modular stacked arches.

It turns out that bees are not only essential to global food production, they also make amazing sniffer “dogs.” Which is how Portuguese designer Susana Soares is able to train Apis mellifera to detect cancer and tuberculosis on human breath.

The Qatar Foundation is distinguishing itself as a leader at Greenbuild, the world’s largest gathering of green building pioneers in Philadelphia, where Hilary Clinton will deliver the 2013 keynote address tomorrow.

Qatar has promised a carbon neutral 2022 World Cup, but we know from the Masdar City experiment how hard that is to achieve. Still, here are five dubious steps AECOM and Zaha Hadid Architects are reported to be taking to support that goal with their joint design – Al-Wakrah Stadium.

It is one of the most important bodies of water in the world, the only one to link the Persian Gulf with the open ocean, and it is frequently at risk of closure due to politics. Here’s your chance to design a new bridge for the Strait of Hormuz.

Israeli designer Omer Polak has designed an adorable wearable vase that keeps a flower or herbs close to the wearer’s chest. The Boutonnière is a lapel pin made from blown glass attached to clothing via a small brass pin.

Creativity, like nature, knows no borders, and we’re all about putting politics aside for the greater good, but a pair of naive American women behind the Israeli startup ArtSetters pulled a stunt that could have put Beirut artists in serious danger.

The world’s biggest street art exhibition was demolished this week in Paris just one month after opening to the public. Destruction of the wildly popular Tour Paris 13 was staged as carefully as its creation. This wall-to-wall-to-ceiling-to-floor painting project was performance art every step of the way.

Turkey is better known for these five unsustainable development projects and a new undersea rail tunnel near a major fault zone than green building. But Konya has just become home to one of the world’s first LEED-certified ice cream factories.

Israeli designers are working hard to curb bicycle theft. One group came up with the “fashionable” Foldylock and the Spine Bike breaks when stolen. But the Cricket uses bluetooth technology to keep sticky hands off urban wheels.

The Shard architect Renzo Piano has partnered with Italy’s Enel Green Power to design a new ultra lightweight wind turbine that has a smaller visual impact on the landscape than conventional wind turbines.

Most westerners imagine that Saudi women are completely deprived of opportunity, and in some cases that may be true, but the world’s largest women-only university in Riyadh, Princess Nora Bint Abdulrahman University (PNU), may steer the kingdom in a more egalitarian direction.

With Masdar City, Foster & Partners was the first international architecture firm to design buildings in Abu Dhabi that borrow from the region’s desert-savvy vernacular. Now they are continuing that tradition with the Zayed National Museum on Al Saadiyat Island, which will sport five wing-shaped solar thermal towers when completed.

The Middle East boasts some of the world’s saltiest waterbodies, but none approach the horror of Lake Natron in Tanzania, one of the harshest environments on the planet. It’s hot, chalky waters can turn birds and land animals into calcified statues, spookily captured by photographer Nick Brandt in his new book, Across the Ravaged Land.

A disused government-owned slaughterhouse in Casablanca that ceased to operate in 2000 now hosts art exhibitions, music shows, film screenings and other cultural activities run by La Fabrique Culturelle.

So many countries in the Middle East and North Africa rely way too much on concrete for their building needs, but Libya Design bucks the trend with Doshma – a new creative hub built in part with a used shipping container.

A young Israeli man has renovated and transformed a disused public transport bus into a double story apartment that even boasts a penthouse guest room and basement. This is the second such bus conversion we’ve seen in Israel recently, a trend that kicks dust in the face of high rent prices.

A group of friends from Tel Aviv got so tired of lugging enormous locks to foil would-be bicycle thieves that they got together to design what may be the world’s only fashionable solution: the Foldylock.

When Israeli soldiers killed her son Bassem in 2009, Sabiha Abu Rahman faced the impossible task of being alive without him. She has since turned her grief into balm with a beautiful garden full of repurposed tear gas grenades.